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Wide spectrum of software? Really?

Quoting:The trouble Windows challengers have had is matching the wide spectrum of software available for Windows already.

Is this really true? My house is all linux, excepting my wife's Mac, and I only have to use Windows at work, where all installs are Official and deviation is Punishable By Dismissal, so I don't really look around for Windows software.

I was sort of under the impression that outside of games, Windows was basically a Microsoft monopoly, so to speak. You have your market dominator, usually an MSFT product like "Word" or "Excel", but sometimes a 3rd party, like "PhotoShop", with an overwhelming market share. You've got a couple of alternatives ("Eudora" and "Pegasus" email clients, "Quark" for desktop publishing, XMLSpy for doing XML), and then nothing. Or maybe there's a whole flock of different cr@pwares for some simple task, all those "file download" (?) tools, or all the file compression things, just a rabble of buggy, poorly working things waiting to be subsumed in a DLL by the next release of Windows. Hey, doesn't a DLL now do Zip compression, making WinZip and so forth obsolete?

Contrast this to Linux. Pick some "market segment", web servers, let's say.
Apache, lighttpd, nginx, and many others. Email clients: Thunderbird, Alpine, and a flock of others. No superclear leader in the email client segment.

I recently had this discussion with a friend from church. His original point (accompanied with laughter) was that there are no applications for Linux.

I pressed him on it and he soon admitted to the huge assortment of FREE, free, and non-free applications on Linux.

However, he wasn't done. He started naming applications like Photoshop, Quicken, TurboTax, etc. So I talked about the available applications to replace them. Then he finally got to his point. (You know, the one he no idea about when he started the conversation.) "Yeah, but you can't walk into Best Buy and buy them."

And that's what the author's quote in the post above is clumsily, unwittingly referring to. Linux apps could outnumber Windows apps a million to one. But if you don't see them in Best Buy, they don't exist.

And that, my friends, is why so many people refuse to take Linux seriously. Because you cannot walk into Best Buy and pickup insert_retail_application_here for it.

Will that ever change? Of course, but we'll have to retire a generation of people who cannot think outside the retail box first.

One of Google's partners in this is Adobe. I wonder if Google put together a list of hardware partners, then went to Adobe, showed them a list, and got them to start work on a Linux port of Photoshop. That really would be damaging to Microsoft, as Adobe is possibly Microsoft's best friend in stopping Windows users from moving to Linux.

@NoDough Equivalents of most of the apps he mentioned that he'd need with the exception of TurboTax he wouldn't need to go to Beast Buy for, he'd either already have them on his distro cd/dvd or they'd be in his distro's repository so he could download and install them. And most of them are free... If he really needs TurboTax or Quicken aren't the Windows version supported by Crossover Linux maybe even Wine?

From what I have heard of chromeOS is that it is basically andriod with a different graphic server and the Desktop is going to be Chrome, as in Google's web browser, so I would guess that the Adobe partnership is for flash, since that is going to be necessary for a full web experience. ChromeOS appears that it will be a bootable web browser.

Well... if one of the results is that the latest Flash is properly and promptly ported to ARM and MIPS that could be a good thing, I guess. I just wish gnash or some other FOSS alternative would work better.

The speculation has been that the Adobe partnership is only for Flash. I did some searching (with Google) and found nothing beyond just the assumption that the partnership is only for Flash. It would make sense for both Adobe and Google, so I would not be at all surprised to see it happen. Google would have a Windows killer if it (a) came preloaded - and it will - and (b) could offer the most popular non-Microsoft apps, except perhaps for games.

> This guy doesn't seem to get that ChromeOS *IS* a Linux distribution.

Aw, you noticed. :)

> The speculation has been that the Adobe partnership is only for Flash.

That seems likely, but it may mean properly working versions of flash for both MIPS and ARM, as well as both 32 and 64 bit x86. It could also (though probably not) mean flash creation programs for Linux.